1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to an image composing apparatus and method of a portable terminal, and in particular, to an image composing apparatus and method for combining a background image and a photographed image using contour matching.
2. Description of the Related Art
As portable terminals become miniaturized, lightweight and slim, their use is increasing because of their convenient portability. Various additional functions are embedded in the portable terminals. For example, the portable terminals provide a game function, a scheduler function, a morning call function, an MPEG layer 3 (MP3) function, a moving picture player function, a digital camera function, and so on.
In particular, the digital camera function is considered as an essential component and thus is provided to most of the portable terminals. The digital camera function of the portable terminals provides a photographing function using a background image, as well as a simple photographing function. For example, the digital camera function provides a sticker photographing function, a special background photographing function, and so on. As illustrated in FIGS. 1A and 1B, the photographing function using the background image is used to obtain a combined image by overlapping a photographed image of FIG. 1A with a preset background image of FIG. 1B, e.g., a picture frame image or a sticker image.
In photographing an object using the background image, a user moves the portable terminal to adjust an angle and distance between the digital camera mounted on the portable terminal and an object to be photographed and their respective positions, and then photographs the object while adjusting the position and size of the object to a predetermined region of the background image, i.e., an empty region where no image exists.
However, the shaking of the user's hand may occur when the user photographs the object while moving the portable terminal. In addition, due to the movement of the object to be photograph, it is difficult to correctly adjust the position and size of the object to the empty region of the background image. For example, the photographed image of the object may be offset to the left or right in the empty region of the background image as illustrated in FIGS. 2A and 2B, or may be too close or too far to the background image as illustrated in FIGS. 2C and 2D. Therefore, when the photographed image of the object is not matched with the background image, the user must try to photograph the object several times in order to obtain the photograph correctly matched with the background image.